Practices and Outlook of Ant Group’s Intelligent Middle Platform: High‑Performance Accounting Database, Virtualization Engine, and Graph Computing

At the 2021 Alibaba Cloud Financial Data Intelligence Summit, Ant Group’s chief architect He Changhua presented "Practices and Outlook of Ant’s Intelligent Middle Platform," describing the technical foundations behind Alipay’s large‑scale promotional flash sales and the "You Pay, I Compensate" model.

01 High‑Performance Accounting Database – To handle hotspot accounts during massive flash‑sale transactions, Ant designed a database with accounting logic down‑shift, lock‑free consistency on single‑core CPUs, and network/storage I/O optimizations written in C and assembly, achieving 20,000 TPS for hotspot accounts.

02 Virtualization Engine for Complex Payment Networks – By building a full‑network monitoring metric system and a distributed structured storage engine, Ant enables real‑time, multi‑dimensional analysis, one‑click metric real‑timeization, and automatic long‑window calculations, ensuring safe and stable payment links.

03 Intelligent Strategy for "You Pay, I Compensate" – Ant’s system automatically extracts features, generates and evaluates strategies, and presents them to experts, achieving explainable, high‑throughput fraud detection (e.g., minor‑aged fraud cases) with billions of data points processed within hours.

04 Full‑Stack Graph Computing – To combat money‑laundering, Ant shifted from linear to graph analysis, deploying a graph database and graph neural networks that cover all Alipay transactions, improving suspicious gang detection by over 94× and audit efficiency by 90%.

Ant’s graph‑technology suite, GeaGraph, combines world‑leading graph databases, online/nearline/offline computing, and record‑setting graph neural network performance, forming a core component of the intelligent middle platform.

05 Towards Business Auto‑Driving – The vision is an end‑to‑end platform that integrates data/feature engineering, strategy/model training, finance‑specific optimization, simulation, and explainable AI, creating a closed‑loop system that enables real‑time, data‑driven decisions and ultimately financial auto‑driving.

Overall, Ant Group’s intelligent middle platform demonstrates how fintech can lead technology innovation, turning massive data assets into continuous business innovation.